Biblical French only experiment

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Commencing June 1st to December 31st, I’m committed to learning French only with contemporary Christian sources, mainly dramatised-audio New Testament with text: “2000 Parole De Vie Version Drama” from Bible.Is and YouTube contemporary worship songs for example by Dan Luiten :heart:and French Hillsong.

Caveat: LingQ threads from 6-7 years ago on learning languages via the Bible invariably turned to debating ideology, hate speech etc. I simply want to have a fun experiment, and become proficient enough to communicate in French with online Christians and visitors to my church, for example.
I want to see what level I can reach strictly using worship/biblical genre imports - so no other lesson types will be allowed, including off-site materials, books etc.

This is my idea of fun. “Learn from content you love”! Actually, it makes sense because I’ve read the Bible cover to cover over the years at least 35 times, and probably New Testament double that - so such familiarity should help me learn Biblical French quickly, in theory at least.

I’m choosing modern contemporary sources, since listening to archaic monotone versions drive me mental, and I can’t stand most hymns. Urggghhh! :crazy_face:

For the record I reset my stats back to zero and lost my 61 day streak and 3,000 ‘known’ words, as I especially want to see how many words I can ‘know’ exclusively in my favourite genre. I’ll probably knock off 1,000 words in the first week alone of course from existing passive knowledge, assuming it’s in the Bible, then see how fast my French really grows especially with material close to my heart. Bible readings can double-up as my daily devotional time.

For the record, I’ve never spoken French to anyone in my lifetime. I suck at listening comprehension and any kind of output even with 3,000 passive words, so hoping the experiment will ramp things up.

I may do short weekly updates, write simple sentences for correction, butcher spoken French, learn songs, put callouses back on my guitar fingers, who knows :blush:.

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Ozemite I think that’s great! I have been reading and listening to Parole De Vie as well! If you go to Grace to You’s website They have many sermons from pastor John Macarthur interpreted into French and they come with transcripts.

Also Desiring God’s website has some books translated into French, and they also have a quite a few of articles in French.

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I think you will improve fast doing this, good luck!

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Have you ever used Bible.com? It has the best parallel text reader I’ve ever used. Any language, any version of the bible side by side with any other .

Genèse 1 | BDS Bible | YouVersion

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Although I am not focusing exclusively on the Bible and Christian content, I am reading portions of the Bible as part of my Korean reading. The Catholic bishops of Korea have a translation in modern Korean that I have a physical copy of and which is also available online, so that I can import it into LingQ. I have found that to be really great content. So, if you are using a modern translation, I’d say go for it!

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Great idea! Previously, I have founds sermons from various churches to be great listening content at the intermediate level for a variety of languages.

  • ICF Church offers podcasts from their churches in French-speaking Switzerland, in addition to Swiss German, High German, Polish, Czech, Albanian, Italian, English, Dutch, and Russian. Locations – ICF near you – ICF Church
  • Hillsong offers podcasts in a variety of languages from their many worldwide locations, including France. https://hillsong.com/
    Best wishes!
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Day 7 Update - Where did the time go?! Was a crazy week.

Stats: 1010 known words, 848 lingQs, 492 learned LingQs, 9.8 hours listening, 13881 words read.

Texts: Mark chapters 1-5
Favourite activity: Singing along with contemporary worship songs every morning (and pretending I can sing in tune :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:)

Ordinarily I imagine we have to get way past beginner levels before we can express ourselves deeply, emotionally, spiritually - but worship songs, which are essentially love songs to God and affirmations of faith - means I can say/sing a few things from the heart already. :heart:

Listening is still very foggy, even with two previous 90-day Challenges. Listening comprehension has always been my brain’s greatest weakness. Words and phrases jump out though; I can often ‘see’ their spelling in my mind’s eye as I listen whilst doing chores. Will ramp it up going forward. :crossed_fingers:

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Hier: 14ème jour
Statistiques: Semaine dernière 1887 Mots connus
1287 LingQs
747 LingQs appris
11.5 Heures d’écoute
54697 Nombre de mots lus

C’était une bonne semaine. J’ai travaillé dur pour apprendre.
Je suis encore mauvais en compréhension d’écoute…
J’ai aussi aimé chanter des chants de louange.
Mais, ma famille dit que je ne peux pas chanter en anglais ni en français! :wink:

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Hier: 26ème jour
Statistiques: 4431 Mots connus
3675 LingQs
1964 LingQs appris
33.7 Heures d’écoute
152,059 Nombre de mots lus

Confession time. :fire:I’ve gotten itchy feet again, and I got a little burned out.
I’ll keep doing French, but I’ve decided to end my little experiment focusing exclusively on Biblical French. I’d been forcing myself to show up on LingQ for the past few days. :scream_cat:I’m sure a lot of that has to do with some ‘life sux’ events this week. I love reading my Bible everyday., especially Parole de Vie. I just don’t wanna be stuck with one genre, or even one language at the moment, okay?

I’m ready to poke my nose into beginner levels, too, to get some of the nuts and bolts I’ve missed from entirely doing intermediate and advanced lessons. So my little French ‘experiment’ has spectacularly fizzled out :tada:. Sorry!

For the record, though, I’ve reached an all-time stat for ’French ‘known words’, yay :tada:Looking in the library, there’s only 40% unknown words in the A2 mini-stories, and 33% or less unknown words for A1 beginner materials, before opening them.

My listening comprehension still sucks, albeit now I can understand some paragraphs, instead of just words and phrases. I’m hoping the shorter, simpler lessons will help. Especially for speaking, too, as I can’t really say anything :scream_cat:

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I think it’s a pretty nice idea. I’ve tried to do something similar in the past, even if I’m an atheist.

The only advice I give you (it’s a little bit obvious, but that’s ok) is not to forget that there are many differences between the register used in biblical texts and in daily life conversations.

Let’s see an example: in this version ( Genèse 1 | BFC Bible | YouVersion), the first line of Genesis is “Au commencement Dieu créa le ciel et la terre”. The problem here is that the past is indicated using the “Passé simple”, but in daily life situations would be much more common to use the “Passé composé” (“Vouz avez créé ce post pour parler sur la langue française”).

Maybe I’m wrong here (I’m not a native French speaker and I’ve never lived in a French speaking country), but I’ve never seen this construction in a conversation - only in written texts - even if, theoretically would be perfect to use this tense to talk about something that happened a long long time ago.

But doesn’t matter if my example is not 100% correct. The general point is that you can’t say “I love thy family” to someone in England today without looking like very strange.

Because of this, if you’re a beginner, I would recommend you to start with more contemporary materials, like the songs you mentioned, and then, progressively, you can start with the real biblical text. A native French speaker who can indicate precisely the differences I mentioned would be very useful in this process.

But, again, I think it’s a very nice project. I wish you the best.

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Good plan to find interesting content! It might be also useful to read theology articles to mix it up a bit, here are two websites you might like:

Hope it helps!

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Wow the first John Macarthur link is great!! Cheers pal ^^

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Ah, I have some of John Piper’s stuff! The evangile site looks interesting. Thanks!

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